JamesSavik

Green I wouldn't be too concerned about your dream. Dreams are the unconscious mind's way of telling us things but usually those things are part of our experience. Note that there were people in your dream. Not strangers but someone that you know. Dreams are messages about ourselves viewed through the lense of our unconscious mind. It is not a scary premonition as a witch doctor might try to tell you. More than likely, it is just a sign of stress and anxeity. Anything stressful going on with you? I mean besides exams, an ex-boyfriend, a new boyfriend, friends that need a lot of attention, Drama (with a capital D), family issues... What I am concerned about is your level of stress and anxiety. I perscribe a nice, long Christmas break vacation WITH Chaz and WITHOUT your cellphone. Green, you've really been through an emotional blender this fall. Just look at your blog. You need and deserve a break! If it is just you and Chaz alone at a hotel with champaign and take out, the quiet would do you some good. Your fan, JS PS- Jung wrote a lot about dreams- Man and His Symbols and Modern Man in Search of a Soul are classics on the subject.

2005 Sucked! Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish! Tsunamis and earthquakes and hurricanes, oh my! Wars and bombs and Iranian nukes, oh my! Bush and Blair and Mayor Nagin, oh my! Is there anyone on the planet that isn't glad to see the wretchedness of 2005 Gone!? How many people died this year in all the disasters? Please let 2006 be better!

I am going to say that light trucks have a lot going for them. I have driven a Toyota truck for years now. In fact, I have purchased three Toyota pickups and a row. Nissans are pretty tight too. I'm now drive a 2003 Tacoma and I love my truck. I get to spend more time driving it than servicing it.

I have taken the plunge and invested in voice recognition software. I am using Dragon Naturally Speaking Preferred version 8. It is very interesting to use this software. It frees me of the burden of typing, which is admittedly a pain in the backside. It will take some getting used to. I'm not used to writing this way, but I think I'll get over it. This is one of a number of things that I have been doing lately to improve my writing. Having worked like a dog for other people most of my professional life, it is time to work for me. Speech recognition software opens some doors for me, that have previously been close. I intend to offer consulting services for professionals, who have to do a great deal of writing. Doctors offices, and attorneys come to mind. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this affects my writing and output. Stay tuned. James _________________________________ PS. This message was composed by voice.

we "usually don't take freshmen out of state." Which is retarded, because I'm better at science (especially physics) than the rest of my team put together. And, I really wanted to go to Washington D.C. Oh well. SB- They deserve what they get if they leave their star on the bench. Hopefully, they'll understand that they've got a sharp freshman and start their real first team.

I agree with Nick. You are a sweet heart and will make someone a great boyfriend. I just hope you find one that good enough for you. -JS

25!? Old!? Ha! In the South, you eat at the kiddies table at family reunions until you are 50. Oh yeah, anyone that gives you a new laptop for your birthday is a prince. :king: Here's to a great year, JS

Um, and lets just pretend that I purposely added Jude

AFF: So anyway if you can't be friends at least try to move on without letting them leave you with pain. OK all of the replies have been from the "high road" school. This is impossible. It is going to cause pain. Here's the good news: it doesn't have to be all your pain. People that have known you for a long time and blow you off or keep you at arms length because you are gay have stolen from you. They have stolen your time, friendship, trust and loyalty. These are precious things that money can't buy. If there is anything lower than a thief that steals material things, it is one that steals spiritual things. Such an act deserves horrific retaliation. If a junkie that steals $70 dollars from a stop-and-rob gets 10 years in prison, what does the a-hole that steals your spiritual treasures? You won't feel right about it until you've given the a-hole a final F-U for the road. Look- don't go out and do something stupid in the heat of the moment! Revenge is a dish best served cold. Very f-ing cold. When they least expect it. I've waited years for a plan to come together but it is so worth it to see your traitor scum squirm like the worm that he is. Have a plan. Think it through. Let the trail grow cold. Forget about it for a while- say 3 to 9 months. Be creative. A dead hooker in the trunk is so pass

Here in Mississippi, the white stuff doesn't come around very often nor does it bother me. But, if you get it in my hair I'll kick you azz.

Good luck with finals Green. Stress really does odd things to people, doesn't it? I wish I could figure out the formula to simulate finals week on the brain. If I could, people would forget about viagra. -JS

Boa- I'm afraid that you've run into the ugly side of coming out. There are some people that will never accept you. I'm not saying that to be mean but it's true. Your best bet is to count your losses, move on and call it a day. I've had a belly full of immature and insecure str8s. I have no problem blowing off people like that because you are just plain better off without their neurosis. I know that it hurts but having homophobic str8s in your life is like having a splinter. You've got to get it out of your hide before it's going to get any better. Otherwise it'll just stay there festering and causing trouble. There is an old expression that comes to mind: F- them if they can't take a joke. You are a good guy and you do NOT need people around that you have to constantly apologize to for being who you are. -JS

Holy Cow Dom! Your pace is making us other authors authors look

That works if you are a cute young pup like you Nick. If it's a big, scary older guy like me, it is the crazed, icy gaze of a psycho. Eye contact is a powerful form of nonverbal communication and you have to be careful how you use it.

I think the reason a lot of BAH HUMBUG Seems to go with the season is that the Christmas seems to start right after Halloween and by the time Christmas does arrive, people have heard so much corny Christmas music, they are either loopy or homicidal. As fo me, I simply ignore all the Christmas crapola until Dec. 10th. It saves a lot of sanity which I need to conserve. NO, I'm NOT a GRINCH. I just don't buy into who jingoistic, hypocritical Christmas commercial complex. There is a reason for the season. It has absolutely nothing to do with Tyco or Hasbro's bottom line.

I hope that means you're having some fun.

"The List" is made quite simply by posting a nomination for a story in the Best-of-nifty forum at Awesomedude's site. Anyone can nominate a story and you don't have to be a registered user of Awesomedude's place- but I encourage people to have a look since it is a good, classy site. The residents at AD will read the nominated story and vote yea or nay. Awesomedude's Place

the Title of the chapter was Nailed which lead to a particulary interesting misconception on my part.

It's also posted at Awesomedude's Place under David Buffet's page. The format (and neighbors) are a little nicer than Shifty.

Some characters mean more to me than others but there has to be some kind of connection because every character is born in your head. Fiction is as life. Nice guys do crappy things; there is a chance at redemption. Punks grow up and mature. Some grow up to be 40 year old adolescents. Shy, retiring people sometimes become heroic in a crisis. Blowhards, on the other hand, may run away and scream like a girl. Characters are not carved in onyx. They change and grow and make mistakes and have flaws. They strive and fail or triumph and occasionally overcome or transcend their human condition and find that little spark of divinity that lives within us all. Case in point: say you've got a character that is a leach with the morals of an alley cat. It's easy to hate him because you know some dick weed that is just like him in the real world. Ask yourself: what might happen to this guy to make him more civilized? One possible scenario that might motivate him to change is that he meets THE ONE and falls head over stupid in love. The object of his affection doesn't want anything to do with him because he's such a tomcat/wanker. He gets his heart broken but learns a valuable lesson: if you are always a a cad, people are going to treat you that way- even when your feelings are real and you are not just trying to get in someones pants. Someone once said that the only constant in our universe is change. If our stories are to live and breath, our characters must change as well.

Dom- You could always get a cat. They can be annoying but never boring. They also create several non-paying jobs that even starving Ethiopian immigrants won't do: cleaning the cat box, cleaning up hairballs and the never-ending game of brinkmanship- chemical warfare genocide of fleas (they must all die die die!). The trick is using something powerful enough to kill the fleas and not the cat or the family. Now that's excitement. :nuke: -JS Aren't they cute and irresistible?

Well I guess that depends on what kind of hero you are looking for. A fighter pilot with 20 kills? A pro quarterback with 35 TD passes a year? A barbarian with a big battle axe? An Olympic champion? The heroic archetype usually battles some evil and triumphs through the use of force or wit. Beowulf for example. He fights the monster Grendel and restores his King's and peoples fortunes. This begs a more interesting question that the authors here should think about: Is it a gay hero that is sought or a hero that happens to be gay? Consider two works: Comicality's The Secret Dairy of Billy Chase and Dom's The Log Way The protagonists in these two stories, Billy and Owen, are are ordinary teens dealing with their sexuality and all of the tricks and traps that come their way. They have faults, fears and quirks but they serve to make the characters more human. Billy is a little self-absorbed and lives in his head a lot. He has a little trouble distinguishing between what is real and what he wishes were real. Owen is reeling from the rejection and abuse by his father while he tries to rebuild his life. He learns that to live again, he has to take some risks despite his bitter experience. Neither Billy or Owen is a Beowulf but they are very human. Their experiences, struggles, triumphs and failures are so very real that you can feel them. There are many characters in gay fiction that behave heroically: Brian of Dewey's Brian and Pete is pretty heroic when he's not angsting himself to death. Evan of Driver's Plan series stories is also fairly heroic. Just don't expect gay heroes to storm Normandy Beach. That's not to say there weren't gays there but the army wouldn't have let them play their little death games had they known. Gays, as heros, fit an entirely different mold. Their struggles exist in several different dimensions at once: the physical, the emotional and the spiritual. Yes, there may be one or several "bad guys" but as often as not, the battle raging inside is every bit as ferocious as the battle in the playground. Gays from different eras faced entirely different sets of challenges. The gay kid in 1950, 1970, 1990 and today are shaped by very different times, attitudes, social pressures and advantages or disadvantages created by their region. Even Today a gay person from rural Louisiana might have problems communicating with or relating to a gay person from New York, San Francisco or Toronto. So where are the gay heros? They are all around but they are mostly invisible going about the business of living their lives.

Dynamic Characters by Nancy Kress Writer's Digest Books, 1998. 100 years ago, Henry James stated that Character is plot. Well, this is hard to dispute. Indeed some characters have become household words. How do you write characters that are appealing, capture the imagination or that readers just simply like? Nancy Kress attempts to anwer this question with her book and does a reasonably good job of it. She divides her book into three major divisions and addresses the details of characterization. A. Creating Strong and Believable Characters: the Externals 1. Choosing Descriptive Details 2. What's In a Name? 3. The Role of Setting in Character Creation 4. Using the World of Work to Enhance Characterization 5. Characterization Through Dialogue 6. Making Dialogue Read naturally 7. Pruning Character Descriptions to a Managable Number 8. Basing Characters on Real People B. Creating Believable Characters: the Internals 9. Using personal thought to characterize 10. Making Clear What, When and How your character is thinking 11. How to avoid letting your assumptions torpedo characterization 12. How to use dreams and newscasts to enhance characterization 13. How to make your villians as readable os your heroes 14. How to create an unsympathetic protagonist without driving your readers away 15. A system for filing in your character details C. Character and Plot 16. How to start anywhere and arrive at plot 17. When conflict leads to violence 18. How point of view begins with character and leads to plot 19. Secondary characters and plot construction 20. How to make characters change 21. An example of how character, change and plot intertwine 22. Basing plots on real events 23. Using old plots in new ways 24. The connections between characters: plot and theme 25. Characters and the writer Is this book useful? Yes. It got me thinking about how I was doing things and how I was already doing some of the things she was discussing. Some of the concepts are intutive and if you are decent writer, you are already doing them. Kress shows you what you are doing and adds a trick or two to your toolbox. >>> Dynamic Characters

The Little, Brown Compact Handbook, 3rd Edition Jane Aaron, Longman Press 1998. The Little, Brown Compact Handbook is exactly what it says it is: a comprehensive handbook of writing, grammar, style, conventions and citation guidelines from the MLA, APA and the Chicago Manual of Style. It is a useful reference for any author with special interests to grad students who have to write dissertations or research papers. This book is divided into 8 major sections: I. The Writing Process II. Clarity and Style III. Sentence Parts and Patterns IV. Punctuation V. Conventions of Form and Appearance VI. Research & Documentation VII.Special Types of Writing Glossary of Usage and Index The only problem that I have with this book is its price: $50 at Amazon or more at you local store. I got my copy at a second hand book store but my copy is the older 3rd edition. >>>Little, Brown Compact Handbook @ Amazon The Oxford Essential Writer's Reference Berkley Press, 2005. This is an excellent writer's reference that is current and more relevant to the task of creative writing than the Little, Brown Handbook. Its focus is more on langauge usage form. The text is divided into 19 sections: I. Grammar, Punctuation, Spelling and Usagr Guides II. A List of the Most commonly Used Foreign Words and Phrases III. 100 Tricky Usage Problems IV. 100 Rare 50 Cent Words and their Meaning V. 125 Synonym Studies VI. Proofreaders Marks and their Meaning VII. Common Citation Styles VIII. A List of Cliches to Avoid IX. A List of Common Rhetorical Devices, Poetic Meters, and Form X. A Quick Guide to all the plays of Shakespeare XI. A Timeline of Great Work of English Literature XII. Biblical Quotes, Characters and Books of the Bible XIII. Major Mythological Characters XIV. A List of Great Print Resources that can be Found at Most Libraries XV. A List of Writer's Advocacy Orginazations XVI. How to Copyright Your Work XVII. A Commonsense Guide to Manuscript Formats XVIII. great Websites for Writers XIX. Forms of Address for Letter Writing This paperback retails for 6.99. >>>Oxford Writer's Reference

Gay people who face oppression and discrimination are heroic by definition. It takes courage to stand up for yourself in the face of hatred and bigotry- much more courage than it takes to hide and conform.